NINA: What if… (Saigon/ New York, 2007)
The desire to live different lives is a curiosity to all human beings. Our frustration with being encapsulated in a single body where choices and paths can be taken only one at a time - and many times not with free will but the imposition of external factors like history, economics and politics – has driven us to dream, to fantasize and to produce art.
With the fall of Saigon in 1975, a five-year-old Nina and her entire family fled Vietnam. Their connections with the collapsing government made them fear for their lives. Living as refugees in the United States, Nina and members of her family became American citizens.
Starting in the early 1990s Vietnam encouraged Vietnamese living abroad to return home to help rebuild the country. They were formally called “Viet Kieu” (Overseas Vietnamese). Today Saigon is called Ho Chi Minh City, and Nina’s family has re-established their pharmaceutical business in Vietnam and is investing in the future in Vietnam. However, Nina and millions of other Viet Kieu who are not born in Vietnam or left the country too young to assimilate the country’s culture face a huge social gap that keeps them apart from the rest of Vietnamese society.
In the project “Nina: What If…”, I took Nina out on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. I photographed Nina, a Viet Kieu, with “local” Vietnamese women who by chance crossed our path. I asked them to hold hands, with the expectations that this gesture might help bridge the cultural gap between them. By the end, it became a two-way experience, as both sides recognized the differences and similarities of their identities and the possibilities--the "what-if:-- that life could bring to each one of them.
I chose the format of a photo album, a common form of visual memoir, in order to focus on different possibilities of identity. Nina: What If… becomes a referent that allows us to glimpse at other Vietnamese women’s lives, their realities and their possibilities and by extension, the realities and the possibilities of anyone’s life.
NINA: What if… is an essay of 22 images, 13 by 19 inches in digital archival print.
The desire to live different lives is a curiosity to all human beings. Our frustration with being encapsulated in a single body where choices and paths can be taken only one at a time - and many times not with free will but the imposition of external factors like history, economics and politics – has driven us to dream, to fantasize and to produce art.
With the fall of Saigon in 1975, a five-year-old Nina and her entire family fled Vietnam. Their connections with the collapsing government made them fear for their lives. Living as refugees in the United States, Nina and members of her family became American citizens.
Starting in the early 1990s Vietnam encouraged Vietnamese living abroad to return home to help rebuild the country. They were formally called “Viet Kieu” (Overseas Vietnamese). Today Saigon is called Ho Chi Minh City, and Nina’s family has re-established their pharmaceutical business in Vietnam and is investing in the future in Vietnam. However, Nina and millions of other Viet Kieu who are not born in Vietnam or left the country too young to assimilate the country’s culture face a huge social gap that keeps them apart from the rest of Vietnamese society.
In the project “Nina: What If…”, I took Nina out on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. I photographed Nina, a Viet Kieu, with “local” Vietnamese women who by chance crossed our path. I asked them to hold hands, with the expectations that this gesture might help bridge the cultural gap between them. By the end, it became a two-way experience, as both sides recognized the differences and similarities of their identities and the possibilities--the "what-if:-- that life could bring to each one of them.
I chose the format of a photo album, a common form of visual memoir, in order to focus on different possibilities of identity. Nina: What If… becomes a referent that allows us to glimpse at other Vietnamese women’s lives, their realities and their possibilities and by extension, the realities and the possibilities of anyone’s life.
NINA: What if… is an essay of 22 images, 13 by 19 inches in digital archival print.
